GM: I always thought I was writing for these fabulous, sexy anarchists. [Laughs] I really did, and it's been kind of disappointing seeing some of them, but the fact of the matter is that I'm putting out work for people like me. I don't have an audience that likes to slavishly follow me, or who wants to worship me or have me be their guru, and I don't, I just want people to think about these things and I just want an exchange of ideas. I'm telling people I've been there, I've been to strange, abstruse spaces of the mind, and the world, and I just want people to talk about it. I don't want to hear people telling me there's no such thing as magic because I know there is, I don't need to be told otherwise. So there are some people who know what I'm saying is true, they've had experiences, and I know that there are people who don't believe me or who think that they don't have to do the work to believe what I say, and I don't want people to just blindly believe it. I'm telling you there's magic in the world and that it actually works, and that if we all do it it'll be brilliant and we'll just see what happens.

JL: It's interesting there definitely seems to be a contingent of people, on the bulletin boards or whatever, kind of a follower contingent . . .

GM: Yeah, and it's sad because they really want the thing to be explained, and they're so angry when I don't, and these guys… you know, I've seen the boards, I've been on there a couple of times, and I just think it's kind of sad. I mean, there are people on there who get everything I'm doing, it's quite obvious to them, and those are the people that I want to talk to, those are the guys who were in the same space. And other people just don't grasp it, they think it's something else, who missed the point, and that's fine, but they shouldn't be looking to me to provide an explanation to their dilemma.

JL: The Invisibles and most of your current work is about pop culture and the culture we live in, the Spectacle, all that. It's been about a year since The Invisibles ended, and there's been a gap where we've been getting different kind of work from you, and not much of your heavy commentary. I was wondering right now, as of 2001--a momentous kind of year--where do you see the culture going?

GM: It's interesting because usually I'm thinking three years ahead. When I was doing The Invisibles, like you said, those ideas were really unusual and now they're everywhere, The Matrix popularized that kind of thing, even Gnostic ideas that were completely unheard of outside of readers of Philip K. Dick or Gnostic texts; and in 1995 I was playing with the idea of video games, understanding that this is a simulated world and that there are higher realities. So I just think it's really weird, but I knew it would happen, it was all the success of The Invisibles. Again it's the market, it's using divination by culture, you can spot cultural trends. You don't have to be tapped in to things to know exactly what's going to be big. I said to Mark Millar, go do The Authority for 1999 because that's when there's going to be another solar surge of punk energy, I told him it would be big and of course it was. People had been looking for big, fascistic, funny people who would come and sort out the problems of the world; and I did Marvel Boy at the same time, knowing that it would tap totally into that current. And right now, pop culture is in the most fabulous fragmentation, it's so confused. There's a ritual period and we just went through that ritual period; the creative people have blown out of it but you still see edges of it in the movies, just because they haven't quite caught up. And the next thing is authenticity, that's what people will want. They're sick of irony, sick of darkness, sick of robo-cowboys, all that. They're sick of the guy who can copy art and feed it back in a shitty way. I think what the Internet has done is kind of made that fragmentation start, because anyone can do it for themselves and everyone can exchange information. And also it's a source of authenticity. You can go to an Internet site and if the guy's really crazy enough it's gonna be great, really big stuff. The stuff's coming up at the roots. I think I just want to get back to the weirdness aspect of my work, but now that I've got access to the distribution of Marvel Comics . . . [Laughs] By the fifth issue of the X-Men, it gets really hardcore, it's about changing the world, it's about mutant politics, mutant thought, mutant music, and about how to apply that to change everything. So I'm really doing kind of what H.G. Wells was doing a hundred years ago, I'm in this space where I'm doing utopian visions, all these different ones, seeing the possibilities of getting out of the state we're in. Which isn't absolutely bad but it needs to be changed, it's time for a change, I think everybody knows.

JL: Are you sick of those ideas you were doing in The Invisibles? The Gnostic thing . . .